Original Reddit post

What are the common concerns with sailing combat? Spongy monsters that appear to have inflated HP values. MtG power/toughness comes to mind. Players will fixate on this as long as they can compare ocean mobs to “real” mobs. Poor cannon and crew effectiveness Cannons only exist for ocean combat, but are easily overshadowed by existing player power. Reducing PLAYER effectiveness is a major “feels bad”. Players really don’t like expecting one number out of their gear and seeing a tenth of that. Privateering as a crewmate attribute feels lackluster. Crewmates in general have very minimal benefit during combat. Underwhelming motivation Port tasks, as-is, are a mediocre pillar of sailing combat despite being sold as the middle intensity option. Rewards are limited to GP, neither as lucrative as salvaging nor yielding xp to compete with barracuda trials. Bounty tasks specifically are devalued compared to cargo tasks due to the added time and variance to complete the task. Loot mostly loops back to the activity itself. Rare drops are focused on improving the ship. Lack of mechanical complexity. Looking at these voiced issues, if I were a developer, what would I be worried about? If sea combat is too easy, it loops back to being boring again. How could a change narrow future sailing combat related design space going forward? Economic concerns and the stigma of drop rate adjustments. Here are my suggestions, and my considerations to the devs where I feel I can reduce hesitancy to implement them. I want to state that my goal here is to try and make sailing combat “feel good.” It’s a nebulous space to try and work in, and each player is going to respond positively to different things, but that is the main objective. Let’s first establish that there needs to be some friction in getting the boat to an optimal for whatever the player wants to fight. Defensively the keel works as a nice upgrade throughout a boat’s lifespan, while hulls, helms, and sails improve maneuverability and cushion attacks. In my opinion, the current setup of sailing, construction, and smithing level offer enough friction or delay on a new account to feel good enough. Established accounts bypass this, but that’s the reward they have for playing the game and leveling their skills. The sailing skill itself is the main throttle, determining when the player can make certain upgrades but also how many crew they can have on their boat–I’ll touch on that later–but in terms of just getting the boat set up appropriately for combat I feel we are in a good spot in time vs effort. Now, on to the actual suggestions. Mechanics You see a lot of suggestions for different ammo types, prayers affecting the boat, or more aoe/targeting mechanics added to sailing combat to make it more engaging. This design space is honestly so wide open that I do not want to spend time spitballing something that is best reserved for someone with boss design experience or more familiar with the technical limitations of OSRS. I want to use what we already have, as of writing, to try and produce a better sentiment when the player gets on their boat with the intent to do some combat. I want to try and come up with the shortest path to get us there. For the scope of this discussion let’s keep this center: If we changed very little mechanically about sailing combat, how could we make it rewarding, desirable, and create a good feeling? Monsters Cut the mob HP. Fiddling with defenses and whether the player is spending grandfathered resources vs cannonballs to kill a monster is not worth the effort right now. Adjusting cannonball damage to hit higher and higher is just going to make the jump between cannonballs and the cannons themselves less noticeable. If basic cannons hit hard, and hard enough, advanced cannons will lose their appeal. The player should WANT the higher level cannons in the same way they want an upgrade in the three combat styles. As-is we have many mundane monsters that hit for nothing but have silly HP pools higher than demons and dragons, who then drop seeds and nests. Cut the mob HP. Cannons I think it is fine if the dude in raid gear can whip out his megarare and blitz through a shark or a piddly kraken. I think it’s fine if a guy with a shortbow and 50 range can sit on his boat and take shots at birds, and the boat is really only there to facilitate getting him to the mob. Getting people on their boats instead of using it as a teleport focus is fine and should be encouraged, the boat has enough defensive upgrades that it can support improving afk ranging birds or sharks or whatever. What does not feel fine is the fact that the boat has an entire weapon + ammo progression system, with crewmate UI functionality, an entire crew stat dedicated to it, a keg drink dedicated to it, support facility slots dedicated to it, and is ONLY used for killing ocean monsters–yet cannons are bad or mid at doing that. My suggestion is to retain the uncapped player damage on ocean monsters. Don’t touch that. Players fixate on their max hits and tweaking them to make cannons feel better will circle us back to the complaints we had at launch. Instead, the cannon should function much like its dwarf counterpart when manned by a crewmate. Set the crew to fire at will or follow my target and let it rip. The cannons sit on either side intimating for multi-mob farming, and now we even have the option of two cannons or a cannon + accumulator per side. I say let the player decide if they want accumulators or cannons for all four slots. This lets the player focus on conserving ammo or turning cash into loot with a bunch of different combinations for cannon, crew, and ammo levels. Let us have four cannons and our own weapons, steer into a pod of dolphins, and just go crazy with it. Every ocean encounter zone is already multicombat–so let’s make it feel like multicombat. If someone wants to be a bad enough dude to sail into shiver of great white sharks or a shoal of krakens with cannons blazing, then managing their combat tree of choice and ship health should be enough activity–IF it is offset with appropriate throughput from cannons. Right now this idea throttles with the limited availability of high privateering crewmates, which leads to my second suggestion. Perildance Bitter has very little niche on the keg. The combat stat boosts are nice if you’re ranging down a monster, but the keg bonus itself is +1 to all cannons. Now I know how much people love their +1’s, and since I think a number tweak in general should be in the works I want to suggest a new secondary effect for Perildance while in the keg. Similarly to the Whirlpool Surprise, Perildance could have a crew-wide stat buff. Unlike Whirlpool Surprise, I feel like you could make this boost a +1 to the stat instead of picking up the floor. This lets a wider number of the existing crew operate cannons up to adamant, and with a fully-kitted boat allows up to three crewmates to make use of the rune and dragon cannon. Together these changes let the player take advantage of the increased crew size in a similar fashion to how they work with cargo tasks, and reduces the amount of crewmen on an average sloop standing around doing nothing. I personally believe the player should be responsible for maintaining the health of their boat as they would manage their health outside of their boat. So I have no suggested changes as far as automating repairs. If we allow for automated damage and high base defenses, health and supplies can remain the pressure lever on the player’s attentiveness. In the event that Jagex wants to use this new system for a more interesting ship encounter, that’s fine. Now they have a bunch of different levers to pull when it comes to how the player can deliver damage, either by limiting the crew, the cannons, or the position of the boat. I can see some added complexity in appropriately timing crew commands depending on mob behavior, etc. Like I said at the start, I don’t want to get into mechanical design space here. Motivation While I listed motivation as lacking, I think implementing the changes mentioned before will ease friction getting started when it comes to combat. A boat which allows you to park a multicannon wherever you want then just needs an enticing enough monster to farm en-masse. The one stickler that I think should be addressed is port task rewards overall, if not specifically bounty tasks. As it stands port tasks offer neither monetary, experiential, or power rewards compared to salvaging and barracuda trials. If the player can pick up a bounty task knowing they’ll get a tidy sum of loot all tied up with a reward at the end, then it’s just a matter of the reward mattering. I’m not experienced enough to know what makes a loot table valuable or not. If sailing combat cannot (for now) be fun mechanically, then it should at least be something that scales with investment and rewards. It ostensibly carries more risk than salvaging does, so it makes sense to me that its rewards should outpace salvaging. sailing locked iron btw submitted by /u/The_Neckbear

Originally posted by u/The_Neckbear on r/2007scape